5 ms·

It's interesting that in tech there is this expectation that every available thing should be done to make the employee as happy and relaxed as possible. If an e

by J-dawg 6y ago

It's interesting that in tech there is this expectation that every available thing should be done to make the employee as happy and relaxed as possible. If an employer refuses to do these things it's met with "does not compute", as in this example. Granted, it does seem to make sense that your employees are as happy and relaxed as possible, but this attitude doesn't seem to exist in other industries to the same degree. For example, I have a friend who works in finance. He was allowed to work from home for the bare minimum amount of time during the pandemic, his company requested him to return to the office almost as soon as the government permitted it (despite his job being possible to do 100% remotely). He also wears formal clothes every day (another thing that is frequently viewed as ridiculous in tech). But, he makes probably 3-4 times what I do per year! It seems that in tech people expect to be "looked after" by their employer more than in other industries, yet simultaneously undervalue themselves. Caveat: this is a perspective from the UK where finance salaries are high, and tech salaries are (as far as I can tell) much lower than the USA.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Yes there's a current trend of thinking that work should be as near play as possible. There are entire classes of work, like digging ditches and driving equipment, that can be sweaty and rote. Not designed to be fun, but to get something done. For pay. This is becoming regarded as mentally or physically abusive. It helps to consider the pay as recompense for whatever hardship you endure to deliver value to the employer. Which seems obvious but apparently is not.
- prepend 6y ago
  > This is becoming regarded as mentally or physically abusive. An acquaintance of mine working in academia told me that her boss was being bullying and abusive. I was really concerned and asked what was happening. She told me that her boss and department were making her come into the office (pre-covid) at 9am despite that she assured them she could do all her research remotely. When she would not come in or come in late, her boss was verbally reprimanding her. This scenario is certainly bureaucratic and not the funnest, but it’s funny to me that bullying is considered making people come into work at an established time.
  - danaris 6y ago
    Requiring strict adherence to arbitrary bureaucratic norms, and particularly berating someone for daring to question them, is absolutely abusive. An awful lot of corporate culture is abusive, and designed primarily to give managers a warm fuzzy feeling of absolute control over their subordinates. Much of it derives directly from the assembly-line era, and much of the overall philosophy behind it is just thinly-veiled feudalism. "But everyone does it this way" is not a valid defense against "this behaviour is abusive and designed to squeeze the agency and will to be more than a drone out of me."
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      And there we differ I guess. The job is the job. Wear this; show up then; answer the phone with that phrase - its the job. Do it, and get paid. Not abuse.
      - grugagag 6y ago
        Because the boss makes the rules and you should blindly follow them. The other team's boss is relaxed with these rules and the team is productive and happy but, you should still not question your boss, always put the head down and say I am sorry, always stay in late without overtime because the boss hasn't left the office yet and so on. And it doesn't matter that the boss doesn't produce anything and that you drive all the work, respect the boss because he might feel offended otherwise.
        prepend 6y ago
        I don’t think bosses should be followed blindly. But showing up and doing the job as required isn’t blindly following, it’s obeying. I think the difference in what is reasonable and what is reasonable. If I question a reasonable start time “9am” that makes me someone that few want to work with. Whereas questioning forced, unpaid overtime is an entirely different, and I think reasonable question.
    - prepend 6y ago
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Comparing manual labor, which actually accomplishes things, to wearing formal clothing for the benefit of no one but your boss, accomplishes nothing of value, is not really fair. The latter is usually not abuse, but it is usually stupid. Pay as recompense for suffering is less compelling when you're supposed to be paid for your output, and there's no reason for the suffering at all.
  - throwaways885 6y ago
    Friendly reminder: You're paid for how easy it is to replace you, not your output.
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      Which is how abusive employment relationships are born. Which is why, unions and workplace safety rules and all that are born.
      - throwaway45349 6y ago
        Not really, it's just life. Unions are a horrible solution and should be avoided at all costs because they're a competitive disadvantage and will sink the company long term. The better solution is to pour money into creating more jobs and uplifting people out of a shitty job into one where there is more leverage. Every industry should be a sellers market.
watwut 6y ago
I am 100% sure that if we all decided that formal clothes every day are way to go, our salaries NOT would go up 3-4 times. Those two things are not directly related. The salary is market thing, to large extend. The cloth and home office do have more to do with cultural background of people who run and join both institutions. It has also to do with value systems - higher preference for hierarchy, higher expectation for conformity because people judge each other by different signals in financial institution. Financial institutions are among the most conservative institutions there are. The need for tie is all about that.
- wegs 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure that, if a software engineer, you were to pick up and conform to executive social and cultural norms, and did the work required to be able to manage people, raise money, and so on, your salary COULD go up 3-4x. Clothing is but one tiny piece of that. You'd also need to learn a new communication style, learn to code-switch ethics/values, and so on. People who can bridge technical, business, marketing, and sales are extremely highly valued. I've learned to adapt, and I have a choice of jobs spanning about a 10x salary range as a result. The choice I made: I chose the job which was the most fun and fulfilling, while still paying enough to where I don't need to stress about money (so long as I live a modest life). At the time, I had an offer at 2x that salary, and was being recruited into jobs at 2x that in turn. I also had more academic job offers where I could financially scrape by, but /with/ financial stress, which didn't seem worthwhile. Also: If financial institutions were so conservative, we wouldn't have regular meltdowns like the subprime mortgage crisis.
  - watwut 6y ago
    I think that comment was not about people who manage people or raise money. It was not about those who can bridge technical, business, marketing either. It was about finance people who could easily do their jobs from home.
paulcole 6y ago
> It seems that in tech people expect to be "looked after" White men who get a job right after college and haven’t developed life skills yet. Then once they get a taste of making $150k+ and having their every whim catered to think anything less is unacceptable.
- watwut 6y ago
  Yeah, finance workers are rarely ever hired right after college. They are also way more oppressed demographics despite having significantly larger salaries.
StavrosK 6y ago
I guess it's a seller's vs a buyer's market, though maybe it's also cultural to some degree. It's generally hard to know which of the two came first, though in this instance I think it's clearer that the market influences the culture.
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
I think it's the hacker mindset of not being afraid to change things. Every job I ever had I always questioned the rules and pushed for change to make things less redundant and more efficient. This was even in retail as a teenager, and being a waiter for church bingo when I was 10. Some of us just have that inherent urge to say "wait, wouldn't it be better if we did it this way" instead of quietly following the rules. My guess is that people with this mentality are more likely to want to be a programmer in the first place.
closeparen 6y ago
Tech workers live and breathe the space between mechanism and intent. Policies that are inconsistent with their stated goals offend exactly the same mental hardware that finds bugs. There's nothing inherently wrong with heavyweight bureaucracy. Roles, ceremonies, witnesses, signatures, tamper-evident seals, 2-man rules, split-knowledge safe combinations... the community loves this stuff. But we don't respect it because it's policy. We respect it because we were following along, trying to break it, trying to do better, and we couldn't.

by J-dawg 6y ago

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Yes there's a current trend of thinking that work should be as near play as possible. There are entire classes of work, like digging ditches and driving equipment, that can be sweaty and rote. Not designed to be fun, but to get something done. For pay. This is becoming regarded as mentally or physically abusive. It helps to consider the pay as recompense for whatever hardship you endure to deliver value to the employer. Which seems obvious but apparently is not.

prepend 6y ago
> This is becoming regarded as mentally or physically abusive. An acquaintance of mine working in academia told me that her boss was being bullying and abusive. I was really concerned and asked what was happening. She told me that her boss and department were making her come into the office (pre-covid) at 9am despite that she assured them she could do all her research remotely. When she would not come in or come in late, her boss was verbally reprimanding her. This scenario is certainly bureaucratic and not the funnest, but it’s funny to me that bullying is considered making people come into work at an established time.
- danaris 6y ago
  Requiring strict adherence to arbitrary bureaucratic norms, and particularly berating someone for daring to question them, is absolutely abusive. An awful lot of corporate culture is abusive, and designed primarily to give managers a warm fuzzy feeling of absolute control over their subordinates. Much of it derives directly from the assembly-line era, and much of the overall philosophy behind it is just thinly-veiled feudalism. "But everyone does it this way" is not a valid defense against "this behaviour is abusive and designed to squeeze the agency and will to be more than a drone out of me."
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    And there we differ I guess. The job is the job. Wear this; show up then; answer the phone with that phrase - its the job. Do it, and get paid. Not abuse.
    - grugagag 6y ago
      Because the boss makes the rules and you should blindly follow them. The other team's boss is relaxed with these rules and the team is productive and happy but, you should still not question your boss, always put the head down and say I am sorry, always stay in late without overtime because the boss hasn't left the office yet and so on. And it doesn't matter that the boss doesn't produce anything and that you drive all the work, respect the boss because he might feel offended otherwise.
      - prepend 6y ago
        I don’t think bosses should be followed blindly. But showing up and doing the job as required isn’t blindly following, it’s obeying. I think the difference in what is reasonable and what is reasonable. If I question a reasonable start time “9am” that makes me someone that few want to work with. Whereas questioning forced, unpaid overtime is an entirely different, and I think reasonable question.
  - prepend 6y ago
andrewflnr 6y ago
Comparing manual labor, which actually accomplishes things, to wearing formal clothing for the benefit of no one but your boss, accomplishes nothing of value, is not really fair. The latter is usually not abuse, but it is usually stupid. Pay as recompense for suffering is less compelling when you're supposed to be paid for your output, and there's no reason for the suffering at all.
- throwaways885 6y ago
  Friendly reminder: You're paid for how easy it is to replace you, not your output.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Which is how abusive employment relationships are born. Which is why, unions and workplace safety rules and all that are born.
    - throwaway45349 6y ago
      Not really, it's just life. Unions are a horrible solution and should be avoided at all costs because they're a competitive disadvantage and will sink the company long term. The better solution is to pour money into creating more jobs and uplifting people out of a shitty job into one where there is more leverage. Every industry should be a sellers market.

watwut 6y ago

I am 100% sure that if we all decided that formal clothes every day are way to go, our salaries NOT would go up 3-4 times. Those two things are not directly related. The salary is market thing, to large extend. The cloth and home office do have more to do with cultural background of people who run and join both institutions. It has also to do with value systems - higher preference for hierarchy, higher expectation for conformity because people judge each other by different signals in financial institution. Financial institutions are among the most conservative institutions there are. The need for tie is all about that.

wegs 6y ago
I'm pretty sure that, if a software engineer, you were to pick up and conform to executive social and cultural norms, and did the work required to be able to manage people, raise money, and so on, your salary COULD go up 3-4x. Clothing is but one tiny piece of that. You'd also need to learn a new communication style, learn to code-switch ethics/values, and so on. People who can bridge technical, business, marketing, and sales are extremely highly valued. I've learned to adapt, and I have a choice of jobs spanning about a 10x salary range as a result. The choice I made: I chose the job which was the most fun and fulfilling, while still paying enough to where I don't need to stress about money (so long as I live a modest life). At the time, I had an offer at 2x that salary, and was being recruited into jobs at 2x that in turn. I also had more academic job offers where I could financially scrape by, but /with/ financial stress, which didn't seem worthwhile. Also: If financial institutions were so conservative, we wouldn't have regular meltdowns like the subprime mortgage crisis.
- watwut 6y ago
  I think that comment was not about people who manage people or raise money. It was not about those who can bridge technical, business, marketing either. It was about finance people who could easily do their jobs from home.

paulcole 6y ago

> It seems that in tech people expect to be "looked after" White men who get a job right after college and haven’t developed life skills yet. Then once they get a taste of making $150k+ and having their every whim catered to think anything less is unacceptable.

watwut 6y ago
Yeah, finance workers are rarely ever hired right after college. They are also way more oppressed demographics despite having significantly larger salaries.

StavrosK 6y ago

I guess it's a seller's vs a buyer's market, though maybe it's also cultural to some degree. It's generally hard to know which of the two came first, though in this instance I think it's clearer that the market influences the culture.

dec0dedab0de 6y ago

I think it's the hacker mindset of not being afraid to change things. Every job I ever had I always questioned the rules and pushed for change to make things less redundant and more efficient. This was even in retail as a teenager, and being a waiter for church bingo when I was 10. Some of us just have that inherent urge to say "wait, wouldn't it be better if we did it this way" instead of quietly following the rules. My guess is that people with this mentality are more likely to want to be a programmer in the first place.

closeparen 6y ago

Tech workers live and breathe the space between mechanism and intent. Policies that are inconsistent with their stated goals offend exactly the same mental hardware that finds bugs. There's nothing inherently wrong with heavyweight bureaucracy. Roles, ceremonies, witnesses, signatures, tamper-evident seals, 2-man rules, split-knowledge safe combinations... the community loves this stuff. But we don't respect it because it's policy. We respect it because we were following along, trying to break it, trying to do better, and we couldn't.